Parliament might be suspended this week for March break, but official discussions are heating up in the backrooms of federal politics, thanks to fast-approaching deadlines on several key issues.
The federal Conservatives must decide within the next few weeks whether to again extend the minimum volumes for grain, which have now been in place for more than a year. The current orders require Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway to move 345,000 tones of grain until March 22, when the volume jumps for one week to 465,000 tonnes.
However, those orders expire March 28, and Ottawa hasn’t ruled out the possibility of extending them.
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Transport minister Lisa Raitt told reporters March 10 that officials with Transport Canada are reviewing the orders, but noted a final decision has yet to be made.
Meanwhile, agriculture minister Gerry Ritz recently told The Western Producer that extending the orders is still an option on the table.
However, the possible extension of the orders comes as shippers continue to criticize rail service levels, with both industry and government admitting the orders aren’t perfect.
CN and CP have been repeatedly accused of cherry picking routes with the fastest turn around times.
Meanwhile, oat and barley shippers continue to report service issues caused by ongoing delays in car orders destined to the U.S.
Those in the industry have conceded that grain is moving better than it was last year, but shippers are far from satisfied.
The latest numbers from the Ag Transport Coalition show that the railways have delivered only 29 percent of cars in the week they were ordered.
More than 22,000 car orders are outstanding since the beginning of the year.
However, the railroads continue to insist they are providing record service, a point CN conveniently highlighted in a March 12 news release, in which it insisted it was providing an average of 4,700 hopper cars per week.
The grain order expiration date isn’t the only federal deadline approaching with implications for Canadian agriculture.
As of April 1, low-skilled temporary foreign workers who have been in Canada for four years will be forced to leave their employers and return to their home countries. Under changes proposed in 2011, those workers must stay in their home countries for four years before being allowed to return to Canada.
Under the old rules, employers could simply apply to have a worker’s permit renewed in cases where Canadian staff could not be found despite rigorous job searches by industry.
The looming exodus has left Canada’s farming community on edge, with sectors such as Canada’s $900 million mushroom industry warning that the departure of those workers will be disastrous.
Mushroom producers are expecting to lose more than 400 workers thanks to the term limit, with most of those workers employed as harvesters. Many of them have at least four years experience, while several others have been in Canada picking mushrooms for longer, said Mushrooms Canada vice-president Bill Stevens.
If those workers are not allowed to stay, he warned, the industry’s productivity will go down at a time when consumer demand for mushrooms is going up.
The industry wants the federal government to extend the stay of those workers for one year, a reprieve similar to the one granted to 1,000 low-skilled workers in Alberta currently enrolled in the province’s Provincial Nominee program.
Also at risk from the April 1 deadline are workers in Canadian meat packing and processing plants, where it has been reported that the number of job openings has topped 1,000.
Stakeholders say the shortage of workers in that industry has been compounded by more changes made to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program last June.
Lobbying efforts around the ongoing worker shortage in agriculture continue on Parliament Hill, with stakeholders taking any meeting they can get.
Those lobbying efforts have resulted in minor changes, such as including feedlots in the definition of primary agriculture, but the push for a permanent national solution to the industry’s burgeoning labour crunch continues. This one will likely become a federal election issue.
